Carole Condé marches on Labour Day in 2013. The statement 'Art is political' resonates in Condé's work throughout her long career.Courtesy of family
Collaboration was the defining characteristic of artist Carole Condé's life – whether it was with her artist husband, Karl Beveridge, or the labour unions, communities and fellow activists whose lives provided the subject matter of the couple’s richly allegorical photographic works.
“She was always a very strong force in bringing other people together,” says Jim Miller, Ms. Condé's long-time friend and the editor of the 2011 documentary Portrait of Resistance: The Art & Activism of Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge. She focused on getting things done, opening people’s minds and arguing against injustices.
Carole Condé sits with her children Craig and Simara, in 1964.Courtesy of family
In the background of Ms. Condé's and Mr. Beveridge’s first collaborative photographs, some text proclaims: “Art is political.” The statement’s broad implications – that art, and artists, were part of society and as such had a responsibility to work toward the social good – resonated in Ms. Condé's work throughout her long and successful career. From her first, controversial, exhibition with Mr. Beveridge at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1976 to their shared Governor General’s Award in 2022, Ms. Condé was driven to make visible the stories and struggles of working people.
Carole Bernice Condé died in Toronto on July 19, at the age of 84. She was suffering from dementia.
With Mr. Beveridge, she collected stories about working conditions in warehouses, on factory floors, in hospitals and in fruit orchards, transforming them into striking tableaux, with costumed performers, elaborate sets and carefully chosen settings. Subtlety wasn’t the point. The question, according to Roz Owen, Ms. Condé's friend and the director of Portrait of Resistance, was always: “Is it going to be too difficult for … everybody to understand it? … Can you get the story and the vision of it?”
Outside of her art practice, Ms. Condé was among the founders of several organizations that sought to foster connections between cultural workers and the labour movement, not only the Workers Art and Heritage Centre (WAHC), but also the Toronto-based Mayworks Festival of Working People, and the Independent Artists’ Union (IAU), a short-lived, more radical alternative to Canadian Artists’ Representation (CARFAC) that ultimately pushed the older union into taking stronger positions on artist compensation. She marched in protests and showed up at picket lines, and, until the pandemic, was a regular presence at Toronto’s annual Labour Day Parade, the lead banner one of several she made for labour union locals beginning in the 1990s.
Paris, 1907, from the series Not A Care, by Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, 2000.
“There’s this kind of idea of artists as an exception,” says Tara Bursey, executive director of WAHC, “a way of working that sort of sits out outside of structures of labour, like artists are auteurs and not workers.” But this was not Ms. Condé's perspective. Rather, Ms. Bursey says, Ms. Condé believed “artists need[ed] to see themselves as workers who are contributing important things to society.”
She was born Carole Condy was in Hamilton on June 27, 1940. (She changed her surname back to Condé, the original French Huguenot spelling, when she was an adult.) Her mother, Clara Condy, was a catalogue model, walking improvised runways in downtown boutiques to give Hamilton ladies a taste of the latest fashions. Her father, Harry Condy, was a mechanic who had converted his father’s blacksmith’s shop into a garage. In the summer they’d pack up Carole and her younger brother, Robert, and head to see Clara’s parents in Nanticoke, Ont.
Young Carole dedicated herself to honing her artistic talents, practicing her technique and taking classes with an older woman in her community. Her efforts quickly paid off. She won a pony in a children’s art competition and, irked at being too old to compete the following year, entered under her brother’s name and won again. At the end of Grade 9, she submitted her portfolio to the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University). By the following fall she was enrolled in classes and living in Toronto – the ponies, presumably, stayed behind at home.
By the time Ms. Condé met Mr. Beveridge in 1966, she had dropped out of OCA to have the first of her two children and split from their father. Within a year she and Mr. Beveridge were married, sharing a studio on Spadina Avenue and showing independently in local galleries.
Toronto in the late 1960s was very much on the periphery of the cultural world. To really make a go of it, Ms. Condé and Mr. Beveridge decided, they needed to be in the centre, and the centre was New York. In 1969, on the eve of Woodstock, they crossed the border with the kids, two Siamese cats and the contents of their lives crammed into the back of a truck.
Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge in front of It’s Still Privileged Art, in 2016.Vincenzo Pietropaolo/Courtesy of family
As Mr. Beveridge describes it, “Originally, we were there as [were most] artists coming to New York, seeking fame and fortune and hoping to get exhibitions and that sort of stuff. And it was partly due to the process that we became politicized, because we realized how the system really operated in terms of which artists were chosen to exhibit.”
With no connections to help them navigate the complicated politics of the city’s art world, commercial galleries largely ignored the Canadian couple. When they could convince someone to come to the studio and see what they were each working on – minimalist sculpture at that point – their guests invariably focused on Mr. Beveridge.
They were not the only ones frustrated. They found a community of equally disillusioned, and increasingly political, artists in left-leaning groups such as Art and Language. “We had long conversations with them,” Mr. Beveridge says, “and they were already beginning to question the kind of values held in the arts. I mean, the understanding was, what really determined artistic quality was the market.”
The couple began attending meetings and protests, activities that gradually shifted their sense of the relationship between artists and society.
By 1976 they had made the two decisions that would guide them through the next five decades: they would return to Canada, where they could work within a community without feeling, as they had in New York, that they were “parachuting in”; and they would create and exhibit their work together. They saw in collaboration an antidote to a competitive system, and to some of the bias that Ms. Condé had encountered as a female artist.
In New York, Ms. Condé had been involved in the Women’s Ad Hoc Committee and conversations about women in the art world, and her first collaborations with Mr. Beveridge put questions of gender and exclusion front and centre. A photo series featuring a group of women in Barrie, Ont., striking for better working conditions at Radio Shack, earned them a reputation as worthy collaborators as eager to show up on the picket line as they were to get picketers into their studio.
Art Is Political A, 1975Courtesy of family
They found a cooler welcome within the art establishment. Invited to exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, they decided to feature a series of cartoons satirizing the values of the gallerists and collectors they had encountered in New York and chronicling their politicization. They called the show It’s Still Privileged Art. Outrage ensued, and the AGO ultimately renamed the gallery where Ms. Condé and Mr. Beveridge’s work was displayed to appease the donor who had previously purchased naming rights.
Today it’s common to see community-based art on display in institutions and receiving critical attention from scholars and art writers, but this was not always the case. As a member of the Community Arts Committee at A Space Gallery in the 1980s, Ms. Condé participated in activities that took aim at the individualism of the art world and argued for the legitimacy of community-engaged art as a crucial form of artistic labour.
“It really became a component of how culture is viewed,” Mr. Miller notes. “And Carole was, you know, a really key person in making it happen and making it function.”
While institutions eventually softened in their attitudes toward the work of Ms. Condé and Mr. Beveridge – which is now part of the collections of both the AGO and the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) – Ms. Condé remained committed to the political ideals that guided her first collaborations with Mr. Beveridge. While the couple expanded their focus over the years to address issues including water rights and the Occupy movement, labour remained a focus of their art and activism.
“Carole’s last outing was to a support rally for the workers at the AGO,” Mr. Beveridge says, referencing the strike that temporarily shuttered the gallery this past spring. “Dignity, like art, is for everybody,” reads a statement posted online by the union. “So we’re on strike for the dignity we’re owed!”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, unable to bring people into their studio, Ms. Condé and Mr. Beveridge were forced to put themselves back into the frame. It made, as Mr. Beveridge describes it, a perfect bookend to their career. “We sort of moved from ourselves out into the larger world and [then] back into, you know, putting ourselves in the work.”
For example, Carole’s Garden, an image from the series acquired by the National Gallery of Canada just before Ms. Condé's death, shows her watering a lush garden, staring down a bull-headed man in a business suit who, gas can in hand, is trying to set it on fire.
In addition to Mr. Beveridge, Ms. Condé leaves her children, Craig Berggold and Simara Beveridge, and grandchildren, Travis Devlin, Ty McClelland, and Rio Justice.
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